Guys, I'm concerned about Jadeveon Clowney. Oh sure, he ran a sub-4.5 40 today at the
combine and is perhaps the best athlete to enter the draft in recent memory. But fuck all that. What I really want to know is ... HOW IS HIS
MOTOR?! Twitter, can you be of
service?

Oh yeah, that's the stuff.
If you have neither MOTOR nor HEART, what good are you, really? I should kick you down my draft board like a beach ball down a flight of stairs.

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The NFL combine is an inherently silly non-event that feels more and more like an act of mass sublimation. But perhaps the silliest thing about the
combine is the fact that NFL teams spend days and days trying to quantify to a distant decimal place the
talents of every athlete in attendance, only to discard those measurements in an elusive and ultimately
idiotic pursuit of MOTOR. Why even
have a combine? Why not just stick a
camera in every player's dorm room? Then NFL general managers could stare at them naked AND see if they ever dared to spend a waking moment
not thinking about football. Far more
bang for your buck.

It's a sin in American sporting culture not to enjoy playing
your sport. You can be rich. You can be talented. You can have a bad day on the field. But if you're a football player, and you readily admit that you don't enjoy playing football all that much? You might as well admit you're a
Holocaust denier. It's automatically
assumed that if you don't love football, you won't try as hard, and that the
team and the fans won't be getting their money's worth out of you. Why don't you like football, son? Are you soft?
What's keeping you from skipping out on the team at halftime to go
pick daisies? YOU ASSHOLE.

Sports is a strange alternate dimension of America where
passion is automatically assumed to be correlated to greatness. This isn't true in real life at all. Like millions of other people, I like playing
golf, but I suck at it. I like playing
the guitar, but I suck at it. I like
frosting cakes, but I suck at it. I
really do. I don't know how you ice a
cake without making the thing look like a wall that melted.

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As with most things, I blame Bill Belichick for this
outbreak of MOTOR-related lunacy. It was
Belichick who enabled the whole Patriots
Way myth that other NFL teams have latched onto as if they were digestive
bacteria. Former Chiefs GM Scott Pioli
used to boost team captains up his draft board because, well gosh dang it,
captains WANT IT MORE, you know? Pioli
was run out of town, of course, and yet that insane mentality persists.

You do not have to love football to be great at it. It's just like any other pursuit in that
those who are gifted with ability are not always the ones gifted with passion. Philip Roth hated writing, but he was very
good at it. Andre Agassi famously hated tennis,
but he was very good at it. Look at every
fucking decent actor who can't wait to direct instead. Enjoyment is not the sole engine of
ambition. People are driven by a whole shitload
of varying factors in life: money, family, vanity, duty, a pack of hungry
coyotes chasing after them, etc. Desire is
just one of them. And the truth is that
desire is often a shitty pied piper.
Look at every failed American Idol
contestant. Oh, they have
desire. Holy shit, they have
desire. They have so much desire that it
never occurs to them to go do something that they might be good at but might
not like as much: chartered accountancy, Ibogaine addiction, etc.

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Football is no different.
If you do your job competently and professionally, why on Earth does it
fucking matter if you like it or not? It
doesn't. America loves to elevate the twin notions of doing
what you love and loving what you do, but most of the time we learn and
grow and prosper when we do things we DO NOT LOVE: working shitty jobs, doing
chores, studying for exams, etc. Those
are the times where we get out of comfort zones and learn new shit and
accumulate all kinds of annoying bits of wisdom. Football pays well and offers players fame
and easy access to sex, but that doesn't mean every awesome player who steps
on the field will enjoy his time there, nor is he obligated to. You can be a football player and take value
from it and fucking LOATHE the game with every fiber of your being all at the
same time. For many successful people,
the job is a need, not necessarily a
want—a thing they feel compelled to do for reasons that they sometimes can't
even explain .Football players play a physically catastrophic
sport and are under constant pressure from nutjob coaches, asshole fans,
and family members looking for a handout. Gee, I can't imagine
why they wouldn't love the game! But no, knock Clowney down your board
because he hesitated for half a fucking second when you asked if him if he
likes playing run defense.

And keep in mind that we don't even know how Jadeveon Clowney feels about the game. It's pure supposition, based on fairly solid evidence that he skylarked through his final season as a nominally unpaid amateur athlete. Speculating about Jadeveon Clowney's MOTOR is a stupid
person's way of discounting every other valuable asset he brings to the table,
such as, oh, I dunno, WORLD-CLASS SUPERHUMAN SPEED. OMG
guys he might get distracted! I don't know why fans or teams do this,
especially when heart meant next to nothing for Tim Tebow or Danny
Wuerffel or any other magic DESIRE UNICORN who wound up getting kicked to the curb. At its innocent best, it's just dopey contrarianism used as a means of demonstrating superior powers of discernment, like a video-store clerk tearing down an Oscar contender. Sure, everyone loves Clowney's game tape, but I had quibbles with the quality of the script. At worst, it's troll scouting, an exercise in queasy-making cultural dynamics.

Whatever the case, the people complaining about HEART and MOTOR are engaging in a silly fantasy. They're trying to stuff football into a ridiculous ideal in which the people playing the game must care about it as much as these people do, at all times and at all costs. I hope Clowney drops to my
team. I hope his motor operates at 80 percent capacity at all times, because I bet that's still enough to mow down every
goddamn thing in his path.